Volume 2 Issue 4, April 2024

Wastewater analysis can quantify the pharmaceuticals used to treat mental health disorders, providing data for policy development. This Comment highlights the potential of such wastewater-based epidemiology to enhance the estimation of treated mental health disorders at the community level.

We launched the ENIGMA-Neuroendocrinology working group with the aim to address knowledge gaps about the role of sex hormones in the brain, which lead to prevalent sex- and gender-based health disparities in biomedical research. We approach this by adopting a lifespan perspective to explore the interplay of hormonal dynamics and mental health in the brain.

In this Q&A, we speak to Tobias Hauser, head of the Developmental Computational Psychiatry lab at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck University College London Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and awardee of this year’s FENS-EJN Young Investigator Prize. His research aims to better understand the neurocomputational mechanisms that underlie learning and decision-making and especially their role in the development of psychiatric disorders.

In this Review the authors address the intersection between mental illness and homelessness in high-income countries, and propose policy and practice priorities to reduce homelessness and to improve health outcomes.

Hyperfocusing in schizophrenia is accompanied with hyperfiltering of irrelevant information over time.

In this paper, authors examine the impact of wildfire-related exposures on emergency department visits for anxiety disorders in the western United States, finding that women and older adults were the most vulnerable.

The authors used a machine learning model to distinguish patients with cocaine use disorder and polysubstance use history from healthy controls, using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging functional connectivity data.

A magnetoencephalography study provides evidence that neural signal complexity declines with brain maturation in human fetuses and newborns and the decline occurs faster in male fetuses.

The authors used a large sample of trios from the MoBa cohort study to estimate direct and indirect genetic effects on maternal depression at various time points using trio-GCTA.

The authors report an association of particulate matter air pollution with death by suicide in Finland that was particularly evident among males and during the warm season; however, the evidence for the associations by urbanicity or subperiod remained weak.

Zhao, Liu et al. investigate the relationship between cognitive decline, chronic musculoskeletal pain and brain structure using an algorithm that can detect deviations from normative brain aging.

Chen et al. employed ecological momentary assessment in two different sample populations from the United States and China to develop proxy measures for emotion regulation flexibility.